Computational Models of Colour Perception with Applications to Camera and Light Design

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This proposal is about how the colours of objects are perceived by different ‘observers’—different people, different cameras—and under different lights (daylight, LED, fluorescent, tungsten). Colour is a very interdisciplinary field touching on psychology, philosophy, chemistry, physics, and computer science. My approach to understanding colour is to view colour perception as a computational process. As such, the models of colour perception developed in my laboratory are formulated as algorithms that can be tested both in terms of whether or not they simply provide the expected results, and secondly in terms of whether they operate in a way that is congruent with what is known about human colour perception from the psychophysical experiments conducted by psychologists. The fundamental difficulty in understanding and modeling colour perception is that because humans have only 3 types of colour-sensitive cones there is no one-to-one correspondence between the wavelengths of light entering the eye and perceived colour. There are many other difficulties too, such as how the same reflected-light spectrum may look different in different contexts, and these all contribute to colour being a fascinating field of research. These difficulties, however, present problems for the digital camera industry, the digital printing industry, the digital display industry, the textile industry, the lighting industry, the scientific use of colour (e.g., in medical applications), and the digital preservation of artwork. The research projects in this proposal address fundamental issues of colour science that have direct application to all these technology areas. The objectives of the proposed research build on the recent progress in my laboratory that include work on metamerism described in our recent prize-winning paper entitled “Metamer Mismatch Volumes” (Logvinenko, Funt, Godau) and on the development of an illuminant-invariant descriptor for colour hues. The objectives include: (i) determining the full set of colours observable from objects under a given light; (ii) developing a model of material colour constancy; (iii) creating a new measure of the colour fidelity of digital cameras; (iv) investigating metamer mismatching as a tool for evaluating the colour rendering properties of energy-efficient lights; and (v) validating the newly proposed hue descriptor and applying it to tasks such as colour-based object identification. The research budget is primarily for the training of highly qualified personnel; namely, support of student salaries and their conference travel. My previous students now have successful careers in the colour-imaging field.